Naguib Mahfouz: Morning and Evening Talk

The death of her husband affected her sturdy constitution like nothing else. She mourned him with every ounce of her being and extolled his glorious deeds, real and imagined, for the rest of her long life. And she lived to 110! She lived through Muhammad Ali, Ibrahim, Abbas, Sa‘id, Ismail, Tawfiq, the Urabi Revolution, and the 1919 Revolution. But no event lodged itself in her heart like the Urabi Revolution, which had counted her husband among its leading men. She would often relate his heroic exploits and imprisonment to her grandchildren, her imagination going to such lengths as to make Radia’s sons and daughters believe it was Shaykh Mu‘awiya who Arabized Muhammad Ali and upon whom Urabi had depended after God. The picture of Urabi in her mind became mixed with Antara, Hilal, and the family of the Prophet while honoring above all the memory of Shaykh Mu‘awiya.

Of her children, only Radia and her sons and daughters brought her joy. She was pleased with Amr, although she only visited Bayt al-Qadi a few times, owing to old age. As for Shahira, Sadiqa, and Baligh, a wound that never healed settled in her heart. She would moan at Baligh as he lay drunk on the sofa in the hallway, “You’re a drunk, a sinner, and disgrace to your noble clothes.”

When his tree burst into leaf and he became an important merchant she said to him, “God has given you wealth to test you. Be careful.”

Baligh loved her, but suspected she was not entirely sound in the head. Shahira had by this time returned to the family house as an outcast and filled it with cats, whereas Sadiqa … alas! What grief she suffered!

Qasim was Galila’s favorite grandchild. He would cover her with kisses and listen to her stories, trusting in her with his heart and senses. When what befell him came to pass she was not worried but said to Radia, “Rejoice. God has given you a saint.”

In the last five years of her life, toward the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century — at the beginning of the 1930s — she finally succumbed to old age. Her window to the world was obstructed by the loss of both her sight and hearing, yet she remained alert and would recognize her loved ones by touch. Shahira looked after her as much as she could until she tired of it; she had more compassion for her cats than for her mother. She would complain about her to Radia whenever she visited, so Radia took turns with her sister and reminded her of the Prophet’s bequest to mothers. “It’s easy to preach. You live venerated in your house and leave me on my own to carry out the bequest!” said Shahira.

On one of her visits, Radia found the hallway teeming with cats, mewing and running about wildly, warning that something was amiss. She discovered Galila lying lifeless on the sofa. Shahira was asleep upstairs.

Gamila Surur Aziz

Bayt al-Qadi Square and its trees weighed down with pasha’s beard flowers had never seen anyone more beautiful, except perhaps Amr’s daughter, Matariya. She borrowed her ivory complexion and wide green eyes from her mother, but had a prettier clove-shaped mouth and a better figure. In contrast to her mother, she surged with vitality and levity and derived the fieriness that tinged her cheeks with pink from her father. She was ahead of her time, not in terms of education, for like her sisters and female cousins her share only went as far as obliterating illiteracy, but in the impulsive, uninhibited behavior her premature maturity and dark yearnings unleashed in her. She would linger at the window watering the flowerpots, strut about the area between her house and her uncle’s next door in the half veil, and meet hungry glances with rebellious coquetry. As a child, she wandered about the square with her older brother, Labib, and as the years passed Qasim joined them. She was a few years older than Qasim, but as she approached adolescence he was the only one around for her eager heart to toy with. Whenever they were alone together she would play with him to arouse him out of his innocence, and he would comply, confused, intoxicated, and delighted, as though seeing the beauty of dawn for the first time. His twitching fingertips touched jewels, ignorant of their value. He was not yet thirteen when he prematurely fell upon the honey. He opened up to her soft hand, dyed with henna like a rose, and inclined amiably to the effusions of her burning breast. The frivolity set her brother Amir against her. He berated her until she wept in frustration.

“Remember you’re her younger brother,” his mother said.

“But our reputation!”

“I know my daughter inside out. She’s a paragon of good breeding,” said Zaynab with the calm that never deserted her.

When Amir overstepped the mark his father, Surur Effendi, said, “Leave the matter to me.”

Surur Effendi tended toward tolerance and at the time was wondering why his brother Amr’s son had preferred Iffat, Abd al-Azim Pasha Dawud’s daughter, over Gamila.

“God will disappoint him. Isn’t our daughter prettier?” he said to his wife.

“Isn’t he the son of the mad Radia?” Zaynab said scornfully.

“My brother claims he is a Sufi but his desire to be close to the rich transcends his desire to be close to God.”

The truth was that Gamila frightened the conservative families in the neighborhood, and they shrank from her despite her beauty until destiny brought her a newly arrived officer at the Gamaliya police station called Ibrahim al-Aswani. He was tall, slim, and dark skinned. He saw her and found her very attractive and, finding she had a good reputation, proposed to her without hesitation. Qasim knew only that his seducer and teacher had changed overnight, like an apple gone rotten. The girl he knew vanished and was overtaken by a sobriety that did not dissolve for some time. She was wedded to her groom at his house in Darb al-Gamamiz in a celebration brought to life by al-Sarafiya and the singer Anur.

It was not long before the husband’s work took the new family away from Cairo. Years went by, and they rose and went to bed without the birth of a child. Surur Effendi died before he was able to see any grandchildren through Gamila. Meanwhile, matters transpired for Ibrahim al-Aswani. He was a Wafd sympathizer. His sentiments became known through the lack of zeal he displayed in executing his duties during the dictatorship and, in the end, he was dismissed. He had inherited twenty feddans so traveled to his family in Aswan and publicly joined the Wafd party. He was elected to the House of Representatives and remained a permanent member of the Wafd. After fertility treatment, Gamila gave birth to five sons, of whom Surur and Muhammad survived. Marriage transformed her frivolity into impressive composure, extraordinary gravity, and generous motherhood. Her ever-increasing corpulence became proverbial. Ibrahim al-Aswani was prone to agitation and mood changes, but she was an ocean capable of receiving high waves and surging emotions and absorbing them with patience and perseverance, so as to restore him to perfect calm and self-control. Thus, it was right that she should be the one to advise Matariya’s daughter, Amana, that, “A wife must be a tamer of wild beasts.”

When the July Revolution came, Ibrahim al-Aswani was sure his political life was over. He retired to his land and devoted himself to farming. His sons, Surur and Muhammad, had joined the air force, but this branch of the family was destined for irrevocable extinction: Ibrahim al-Aswani was killed in a train crash in 1955 when he was fifty-five and Gamila only fifty; Surur’s plane was hit in the war of 1956 and he perished; and his brother, Muhammad, followed in the war of 1967. Gamila was delivered from her loneliness and sadness in 1970, dying of stomach cancer at the age of sixty-three. At the time of her death she resembled a branch without shoots on a family tree.